American Anthropologist最新文献

{"title":"My grandmother was a tailor","authors":"Cristina Moretti","doi":"10.1111/aman.28066","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.28066","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In this article I evoke key elements of my Italian grandmother's life—her knitwear workshop, her practice as a tailor, and her sensorial engagements with bodies and dress—and interweave them with reflections from my fieldwork in Milan, Italy. Family stories about my grandmother are steeped in things that have disappeared—objects and materialities, forms of women's work, and familiar places in a changing city. Loss and absence are here a particular form of memory that shapes relations between generations of women. I am particularly interested in the difficulties of researching the lives of women when these center objects, places, senses, and experiences that have been displaced as part of historical and cultural change. To this end, I draw from the work of Italian anthropologist Ernesto de Martino. His attention to losing one's place as a form of presence, and to magic as a strategy for noticing that which disappears, helps me consider the stories of my grandmother alongside the changing roles of small tailors and dressmakers. In this context, “intimate ethnography” is a strategy to attend to gendered and historically precarious work while taking into consideration its performative, material, and embodied aspects.</p>","PeriodicalId":7697,"journal":{"name":"American Anthropologist","volume":"127 2","pages":"339-352"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2025-05-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/aman.28066","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143939108","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Taking distinction practices seriously: Methodological reflections on ethnographic distance in fieldwork with marginalized people","authors":"Chaoxiong Zhang,&nbsp;Yang Zhan","doi":"10.1111/aman.28067","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.28067","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Anthropologists often consider the distinction from our interlocutors a barrier, assuming that overcoming the distance allows us to understand our interlocutors. Other times, ethnographers intentionally maintain ethnographic distance to avoid “doing harm” to our interlocutors. In either case, ethnographers are assumed to be responsible for maintaining a proper distance from our research participants. As two cultural anthropologists who work with marginalized groups (drug users and rural-to-urban migrant workers), we are aware of our emotional, cultural, and epistemological distances from our interlocutors. However, we also notice that our interlocutors often take the initiative to define their distance from us. In this paper, we explore these often-overlooked distinction practices employed by our research subjects. We view such actions as active negotiation with power relations, rather than passive avoidance. Thus, we propose a shift from merely acknowledging the intrinsic distinctions in the researcher-researched relationship to learning from and understanding the distinctions created by our interlocutors. We argue that our interlocutors’ agency in these distinction practices is crucial and warrants significant attention in ethnographic research. We further highlight distinction as a valuable method, a way of not only understanding our research subjects but also participating in their world.</p>","PeriodicalId":7697,"journal":{"name":"American Anthropologist","volume":"127 2","pages":"308-318"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2025-04-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/aman.28067","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143939318","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Jill Susanna Dubisch (1943–2023)","authors":"Michael Herzfeld","doi":"10.1111/aman.28068","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.28068","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":7697,"journal":{"name":"American Anthropologist","volume":"127 2","pages":"404-408"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2025-04-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143939271","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Commentary on “Unsettling the Self: Autoethnography and Related Kin”","authors":"Ruth Behar","doi":"10.1111/aman.28064","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.28064","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;p&gt;I have read these papers with awe, surprise, and joy, as well as with a touch of sadness—where was this anthropology when I was starting out almost half a century ago? An anthropology that's personal, intimate, compelling, humbling, healing, holistic, multigenre, poetic, written with grace and humility, and most of all so very human. I wish I were young now and starting out and knew I didn't have to ask for permission to write as freely as the authors here do—with such vulnerability, such deep feeling.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The editors of this volume, Christine Walley and Denielle Elliott, ask, why is this writing happening now? I wonder if in a world at once so fractured and so interconnected, a world at once on fire and collapsing into the sea, perhaps there simply isn't time to stand on ceremony and wait to be patted on the back. We must do the writing that doesn't alienate us from ourselves, the writing that is tender and tough, beautiful and unflinching, memorable and haunting. This is the writing that unsettles the self, because for many of us (I don't dare say “all of us” since there are circles where things haven't changed all that much), anthropology is no longer the study of the “other”; it is a study of our own otherness.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Going elsewhere, because elsewhere is where we're supposed to find our anthropological subject matter, ceases to make sense now that elsewhere is everywhere and nowhere. It's a moment when delving into the heart of things and examining who we are and how we reached our positions as thinkers has turned into a new kind of quest narrative where homecoming is at the center of the journeys we take, and we draw on research, self-reflection, and the art of writing to tell stories that would otherwise have been lost for seeming “too personal.”&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Those of us doing this work aren't the hardy sorts that anthropologists once tried to be—getting appendices removed before setting off to do fieldwork, suffering through bouts of malaria while doing fieldwork. We are a tribe of sensitive anthropologists, keenly aware of our colonizing heritage and wary of causing more harm. We have learned to listen, and now we want to listen to those closest to us, our most intimate interlocutors—a grandmother, a father, a daughter. After all, the principles of kinship are part of our legacy as anthropologists. We are skilled at addressing genealogy. So, we are analyzing our own kinship structures, our own families, and offering chronicles based on different sorts of inheritances, including garments, documents, stories, and traumas left unspoken but remembered. And some of us turn the spotlight on ourselves, examining the lived experience of our vulnerability and our unsettledness through the study of illness, cancer, depression, loss, and grief, recognizing the urgency of being present in those moments and that studying anything else amid anguish and despair seems somehow false.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Writing any kind of ethnography involves a strong commitment to tell","PeriodicalId":7697,"journal":{"name":"American Anthropologist","volume":"127 2","pages":"395-396"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2025-04-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/aman.28064","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143939321","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Technological sovereignty in agroecology: Harnessing GIS and drones for socially just food systemsDrones and geographical information technologies in agroecology and organic farming: Contributions to technological sovereignty, Edited By Massimo De Marchi, Alberto Diantini, Salvatore Eugenio Pappalardo, Boca Raton: CRC Press. 2022. 308 pp.","authors":"Edo Hariyanto,&nbsp;Melinda Novi Maghfiroh,&nbsp;Rizqi Roikhan","doi":"10.1111/aman.28073","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.28073","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":7697,"journal":{"name":"American Anthropologist","volume":"127 2","pages":"397-399"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2025-04-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143939316","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Spectral sonics: Field recordings from an extractive zone","authors":"Zsuzsanna Ihar","doi":"10.1111/aman.28072","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.28072","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;p&gt;In the Lumière Brothers’ 36-s short, &lt;i&gt;Oil Wells of Baku: Close View&lt;/i&gt; (1897),&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; we see wooden oil rigs consumed by ravenous flames in the foreground, thick black smoke billowing in the background. At eight frames per second, it is a (silent) spectacle which blurs the start of crude oil extraction with the birth of cinema itself, rendering the advance of the petrochemical age an aesthetic revolution as much as a scientific one (LeMenager &lt;span&gt;2012&lt;/span&gt;). The short inspired the emergence of a distinct “oil canon” within Azerbaijan's film industry, with subsequent features depicting Baku, the capital city and a historical oil town, as a landscape of oilfields, derricks, wells, and obsidian pools of crude oil. Films like &lt;i&gt;The Reign of Oil and Millions&lt;/i&gt;, Azerbaijan's first feature (financed by several oil tycoons), prioritized the ocular, encouraging viewers to marvel at the enchanting and entrancing aesthetics of oil and to identify the city as a composite of oil infrastructure, oil aesthetics, and oil culture. Oil emerged as a protocinematic medium, in the words of Susan Schuppli (&lt;span&gt;2015&lt;/span&gt;, 435), where its optical effect constituted a “cinematic feature of its very ontology, its molecular structure and behavior,” producing a “slick image.”&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;This visuality has been a consistent feature across other media as well—from cartography and film to photography, literature, and journalism. Much like the Lumière Brothers, visitors like Charles Marvin focused on the visual attributes, fascinated by enormous quantities of “dense smoke, soot, and sludge” produced as oil moved through the refining process. Early travelogues, much like early films, narrowed descriptions of life in the oilfields of Baku down to “black and greasy” buildings, vast morasses of mud and oil and roads weaving between “jutting rock and drifting sand” (Marvin &lt;span&gt;1891&lt;/span&gt;, [1884], 34). For foreigners particularly, it was all a “splendid spectacle” (35), easy to apprehend and part of a perfectly rational system, congruous with the science of the day. This slickness of depiction extended to early mapping projects of Baku, which tightly wove urbanism, the map and oil together, depicting the city not as geometric configurations of inhabitable space, but as parcels of Crown-owned or private oil lands. A good illustration of this is Baku City Administration's 1913 Plan of Baku, which alongside demarcating land allocated for sale by the annual treasury, primarily concerned parcels of oil land and parcels intended for commercial oil production, leaving out other spheres of life and production (Blau et al. &lt;span&gt;2018&lt;/span&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;However, through their ocularcentrism (Jay &lt;span&gt;1988&lt;/span&gt;),&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; such narratives and forms have tended to neglect the other sensoriums of oil—namely, the soundscape of petroleum, its extraction, and refinement. This essay and accompanying multimodal piece attempts to expose the “slick image” (Schuppli &lt;span&gt;2015&lt;/span&gt;","PeriodicalId":7697,"journal":{"name":"American Anthropologist","volume":"127 2","pages":"388-394"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2025-04-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/aman.28072","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143939270","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Cartographic archives: Excavating the subterranean with a camera","authors":"Pablo Aguilera Del Castillo","doi":"10.1111/aman.28071","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.28071","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;p&gt;Maps are complex artifacts that can simultaneously illuminate and obscure. They bridge the realms of the visible and the invisible, probing the limits of what can or cannot be seen. Much like any piece of literature, maps carry with them an authorial voice, a specific vision of the world, and a desire to make that vision known to others. In any map, the mapmaker's voice conveys a desire to materialize the land through a specific signification system composed of names, lines, dots, and signs (Harley, &lt;span&gt;1988&lt;/span&gt;;&lt;span&gt;1989&lt;/span&gt;; &lt;span&gt;2002&lt;/span&gt;). Yet close analysis of dozens of historical Hacienda maps of an Indigenous town in the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico (drawn between 1866, 1918, and 1919 by Yucatec cartographers) reveals another possible reading of maps. This reading of maps is grounded in a photographic approach that explores the visual multiplicities of these documents, powerful reminders of Indigenous history tied to the Yucatec henequen (&lt;i&gt;Agave fourcroydes&lt;/i&gt;) plantation system and the consolidation of both modern agrarian capitalism and the formation of the Mexican state at the beginning of the 20th century.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Using the camera as an instrument of observation, I dwell in the materiality of maps, allowing the different visions of the document to be the main point of departure for my thinking. This essay explores how map fragments shown here&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; can be understood as an archive of Yucatec subterranean history, characterized by the entanglement between Indigenous history, changing mapping practices, and different orientations toward the land. As my main instrument of visual analysis, the camera allows me to examine the cartographic history of a Mayan town called Homún.&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt; The careful revision of this history shows the historical inscription of a number important number of subterranean sites, described in their original Mayan names: Xkeben, Yaxbacaltun, Onichen, Akabchen, Xmamil, Xcuchen, Acula, Oxola, Chelem, Koman, Kampepen Noria, Chen Kanun, Chenchibe, Pozo Jaybil, Tihohob. All these names will eventually disappear from the contemporary maps of this town. Nevertheless, when analyzing these older maps, the Mayan names of places are still there, and by looking at these sites, reinscribing them through the camera, we illuminate the narratives hidden in their Mayan toponymics. Here, the names and the very act of naming the subterranean foregrounds a particular history of Indigenous dwelling in the land. Even in the earliest accounts of the Maya, such as those recorded in the pages of the classic Mayan book of origins known as &lt;i&gt;Popol Wuj&lt;/i&gt;, the underground space of Xibalba and the Seven Caves of Life is understood as the main source of the divine, all life, and the origins of humans (Breton et al., &lt;span&gt;2003&lt;/span&gt;). Naming this subterranean place is thus a way of calling attention to the Indigenous relations sustained by the recognition of subterranean spaces and their histories. It is a fo","PeriodicalId":7697,"journal":{"name":"American Anthropologist","volume":"127 2","pages":"381-387"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2025-04-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/aman.28071","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143939317","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Writing in community: Relationship building and accountability in knowledge production","authors":"Jordi Armani Rivera Prince,&nbsp;Emily M. Blackwood,&nbsp;Madeleine Landrum,&nbsp;Emily B. P. Milton,&nbsp;Elizabeth L. Rodgers,&nbsp;Monica Barnes,&nbsp;Elizabeth Chin,&nbsp;Christa Craven,&nbsp;Kristina Douglass,&nbsp;María José Figuerero Torres,&nbsp;María A. Gutiérrez,&nbsp;Sarah Herr,&nbsp;Lisa Hodgetts,&nbsp;Kirk A. Maasch,&nbsp;Kylie E. Quave,&nbsp;Danilyn Rutherford,&nbsp;Daniel H. Sandweiss","doi":"10.1111/aman.28070","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.28070","url":null,"abstract":"<p>As anthropology reckons with its past, present, and future, anthropologists increasingly seek to challenge inequities within the discipline and academia more broadly. Anthropology, regardless of subdiscipline, is a social endeavor. Yet research often remains an isolating (though not necessarily solitary) process, even within research teams and in coauthorship contexts. Here, we focus on peer-reviewed publication as the principal manifestation of knowledge production and propose a method for challenging division, hierarchy, power differentials, and adherence to tradition: <i>writing in community</i>. Writing in community is a collaborative form of writing that centers care, abundance, joy, and personal satisfaction over the individuality currently rewarded by the academy. This process engenders consensus, circumvents normative hierarchical research and writing, and promotes relationship building. Here, we experiment by inviting reviewers and editors into our community to collectively contribute to the writing process and reflect on that experience together. Ultimately, we challenge norms for scholarship, (co)authorship, and ways of knowing to offer a more equitable praxis of knowledge production. We propose that writing in community can help anthropologists enact values of multivocality and research transparency.</p>","PeriodicalId":7697,"journal":{"name":"American Anthropologist","volume":"127 2","pages":"319-338"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2025-04-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/aman.28070","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143939320","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Jane Isabel Guyer (1943–2024)","authors":"Pauline E. Peters","doi":"10.1111/aman.28069","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.28069","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":7697,"journal":{"name":"American Anthropologist","volume":"127 2","pages":"400-403"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2025-04-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143939266","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Testimonies of harm and refusal in the Texas assault of DEI","authors":"Mariela Nuñez-Janes,&nbsp;Frida Garcia,&nbsp;Joshua Hamilton","doi":"10.1111/aman.28062","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.28062","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":7697,"journal":{"name":"American Anthropologist","volume":"127 2","pages":"376-380"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2025-04-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/aman.28062","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143939291","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}